Destinations: Beneath Malta

Visitors to Malta and Gozo, 60 miles off the southern coast of Sicily, are often immediately impressed by the islands’ honey-colored limestone basilicas erected 500 years ago by the Knights of St. John. But you have to go back 5,000 years to reach Malta’s earliest, and perhaps most awe-inspiring, temples—some predating Stonehenge and the Giza pyramids by 1,000 years. The most unusual of the two-dozen megalithic temples dotting the islands is a large underground catacomb known as the Hypogeum, located in Paola, a suburb of the Maltese capital of Valletta. During the second half of the fourth millennium B.C., […]